Is populism taking a pause?

Yesterday’s conventional wisdom: A wave of insurgent populism is sweeping the West, threatening its foundational institutions – the European Union, the Western alliance, even liberal democracy itself.

Today’s conventional wisdom (post-first-round French presidential election): The populist wave has crested, soon to abate.

Chances are that both verdicts are wrong. The anti-establishment sentiment that gave us Brexit, then Donald Trump, then seemed poised to give us Marine Le Pen, has indeed plateaued. But although she will likely be defeated in the second round, victory by the leading centrist, Emmanuel Macron, would hardly constitute an establishment triumph.

Macron barely edged out a Cro-Magnon communist (Jean-Luc Melenchon), a blood-and-soil nationalist (Le Pen) and a center-right candidate brought low by charges of nepotism and corruption (Francois Fillon). And the ruling Socialist candidate came in fifth, garnering a pathetic 6 percent of the vote.

On the other hand, the populists can hardly be encouraged by what has followed Brexit and Trump: Dutch elections, where the nationalist faded toward the end and came nowhere near power; Austrian elections, where another nationalist challenge was turned back; and upcoming German elections, where polls indicate that the far-right nationalists are at barely 10 percent and slipping. And, of course, France.

As for Trump, he ran as a populist and won as a populist but, a mere 100 days in, he is governing as a traditionalist.

The Obamacare replacement proposals are traditional small-government fixes. His tax reform is a follow-on to President Reagan’s from 1986. His Supreme Court pick is a straight-laced, constitutional conservative out of central casting. And his more notable executive orders read as a wish list of traditional business-oriented conservatism from regulatory reform to the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines.

The one exception may be trade policy. As of now, however, it remains ad hoc and idiosyncratic. It’s not yet clear if he is serious about, say, withdrawing from NAFTA or just engaging in a series of opening negotiating gambits.

The normalization of Trump is one indicator that there may be less to the populist insurrection than imagined. The key, however, is Europe, where the stakes are infinitely higher. There the issue is the future of the nation state itself, as centuries of sovereignty dissolve within an expanding superstate. It influences every aspect of daily life – from the ethnic makeup of neighborhoods to the currency that changes hands at the grocery.

It is appeared that France is not quite prepared to give up on the great experiment. But the Europeanist elites had better not imagine this to be an enduring verdict.

The French election wasn’t a victory for the status quo. It was a reprieve. For now, the populist wave is not in retreat. It’s on pause.

This story was originally published April 28, 2017 at 4:47 PM with the headline "Is populism taking a pause?."